Twitter’s buzzing with technolust based on an Engadget article picturing a Microsoft concept-computer.
Looks lovely, but the photo is misleading. It shows lines of cursive writing that are fraction of a size of the reader’s fingernail. Take a look at this blowup:
Based on my fingernail, that cursive writing is about 3mm tall. You might be able to read 8 point cursive handwriting on a high-resolution dispay, but there’s no way under Heaven that you can write anywhere near that size, especially not using a stylus on a glass screen.
In fact, using a stylus on a Tablet PC, you write about 33-50% larger than you do on a piece of paper because your cursive writing is based on the muscle memory of pushing a pen or pencil over paper, which is more resistant. Personally, my experience is that on the 12″ diagonal screen of my Tablet PC, it “feels” like a writing area close to a 4″ x 6″ index card.
Don’t get me wrong — the Microsoft Courier looks like a great form-factor. But the user experience impliedby that photo is not realistic. It’s perfectly possible to imagine that what’s shown is a zoomed-out page and that when you’re writing and sketching you’re zoomed in to a much smaller viewport. But the user experience that everyone dreams of — the user experience of a digital Moleskine notebook — requires innovation in either the screen surface or the stylus tip. As far as the iPad and the idea that dragging your great big finger across a piece of glass is going to be an acceptable way to write or draw, the sooner you give up on that hope, the better.
O’Reilly and Microsoft Press have recently switched to using eBooks as the preferred media for distributing review copies. Like all book reviewers, I receive more books than I actually review. However, since I live in Hawaii, the physical and energy waste of a book that goes unread and for which its difficult to find a home (no colleges on my side of the island) is apparent.
I hope other publishers follow in their footsteps and switch to eBooks (preferably not non-reflowable PDF!) as the default format for reviewers.
(For what it’s worth, I think the tone of my column may be a little more negative that I intended. I tried to be balanced pro and con, but perhaps I over-emphasized the problems.)
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